Eccentric Circles Read online

  He had read them straight through in sequence a week ago and had done it twice last night. He would just have to keep on doing it until he got his damn strings tight.

  Darling,

  I’ve been here two days and already I want to forget the whole idea and come running home. I feel like such a cliché. New York is a bad dream, but like all day? I wonder how I ever decided to do this and I have not gone one single minute (as in literal minute, sixty seconds) without seeing you in my mind.

  I was so sure it was Necessary and Right for me, and so here I sit in my “large studio apartment” with zero (count ’em, zero!) windows and nothing much else either. I hate TV but I’m thinking better get one quick or I’ll be going for crazy.

  People here won’t talk to you. They won’t talk to me, anyhow, maybe they’d talk to you. The streets are glutted with these people who won’t smile or talk and the cars all try to run the people over (which may be why the people look so angry?) plus it smells like the inside of a muffler. Not that I’ve been in one, but the mind travels, you know.

  That’s the story line so far. Ambitious young fool of a girl gets the big cold shoulder from the cold hard city and wants to fly away home and yes, you told her so. I don’t know how long I’ll last. I miss you more than I even imagined, hate this place more than I imagined, hate myself a little too. Just one lonesome heartsick gal who wishes her man was here to laugh it all away with her.

  All my love,

  Katy

  Doug was better now, much better. The table, the booth, the whole sweetly glowing room had become his den and he could smile at the funny signs (“In God We Trust—all others pay cash”), the stuffed blue-and-silver sailfish, yellowed photographs of F.D.R. and Carmen Basilio. He smiled at the flirty waitress, who was trying to peek at the second envelope. Something about her threw out a challenge to drink, and as she set him up with a mug of the house ale, Doug decided this must be the correct, ordained pace—a round for every letter.

  When you were really depressed, according to Kate herself, you felt like a puppet whose strings had been cut. But Doug was not depressed, he was in control of it now. The letters were all here, he had a world of time and space …

  Darling,

  You are not required to answer so promptly. If you do, you will waste your life, because I may very well write fifty-five letters a month. I’m neurotic, I need you, and I will write to sublimate, see? Whereas you are fine, you’re home and happy (apart from the wandering bitch who maybe you miss in the evening when the sun go down) so save the trees.

  You better not, by the way, I want tit for tat. (I know, I know, you just want tit, but I want fifty-five letters a month right back.)

  Nothing new. I did see a movie last night with “one of the girls from the office” and it was fun just trying to have some fun. The movie was Bride of Rocky 6 or Son of Airport 7 and the popcorn cost as much as the movies do in Braxton. But the job feels a little better and I do know a few people there to say hello.

  Have dreamed of you every night but the first (when I didn’t sleep) and I daydream you too, every minute on the minute.

  All my love,

  Katy

  There was something nice about having the letters in one neat packet, having every word together. It was a way of keeping Kate with him, a version of her. In the letters, particularly the early ones, she was perfectly herself, and her words were just a continuation of her voice, another chapter in their romance. Weeks after she’d left, Doug was able to feel that “in ‘letter’ and in spirit,” as she put it, they were still together. Of course he knew now that even by the seventh or eighth letter, she would begin to sound different.

  My love,

  It is hard to believe I’ve been here just three weeks. A long dreary lifetime. Plus it feels like you have been away, not me, and I must confess that at times I’ve been a bit cross with you for deciding to go. Then I remember who’s who and wonder if you are perhaps a bit cross with me. (I hope not.)

  How are you? Cold and lonely in the night, I hope—but not really. I hope you’re having some fun, because I won’t even try to have any if I feel you aren’t. There are ways of having fun here. New York is definitely better once you know your way around the streets, where to go for food etc. I’ve gotten close to a girl named Mary Davenport at the magazine. She’s from Kansas, but has lived here six years, and has had a few actual writing assignments for the travel section. Imagine it. She got paid, lots too, for eating and sleeping in old-timey inns in Maine—checking out their log fires, coziness quotient and all that.

  Anyhow, she’s nice and a real help. In fact I may give up my glorious windowless studio and room with her. Her roommate just married a doctor. I would pay less and have much more—four rooms of rent-controlled heaven, with a huge sunny kitchen.

  Some bad news too. I won’t be let out of jail till Thanksgiving. Apparently now is big push time at the magazine and one can’t (CAN’T, says Mary) have any fun at all during sober October if one seeks to make ze favorable impression.

  Maybe you would come down here? I am not sure what it would be like (since now I work most nights too). But think about it.

  Much love,

  Katy

  “Are you writing a book?” asked the waitress, as she neatly centered his next ale on a round cardboard coaster. Each time she arrived, she brought a new coaster with a colorful painting of the Genessee 12-Horse Team pulling the old ale-wagon. Doug was collecting them in his shirt pocket.

  “Hardly,” said Doug, surprised to feel a wide grin stretching his features. “I’m just here getting hammered. Bombarded, as it were.”

  “So you are,” she grinned back. “Or so it were.”

  “You have to admit, it’s a lot easier than writing a fucking book.”

  “I’m sure it is. It just looked like you were a writer.”

  “No. I did have a girlfriend once who thought she was a writer, but that was at least a week ago.”

  “Oh,” said the waitress, not so careless now, examining his face for symptoms. All she found was the grin, pinned up at both corners by ale, and so she went ahead with the banter. “I would never go out with a writer. You’d have to be so careful what you say.”

  “Plus you face the problem of who they get to play you in the movie version.”

  “Are you sure you’re not a writer?”

  “Pretty sure, but what’s it matter? I haven’t asked you out yet anyway.”

  She left him with his drink, his coaster, and a small informative smile. Doug could tell his own smile was still too wide, but he couldn’t seem to rein it in. He remembered the tough-guy line, Wipe that smile off your face, and gave it a try, to no avail.

  Hey you, it’s me again. Sorry I didn’t write last week. They hitched the mule to the cart and didn’t unhitch it till today, which happens to be Sunday. (Yes, I do know a girl cannot be a mule, or a mule cannot be a girl.) They have one of these crises every month, when it comes time to put an issue “to bed,” and though I considered going mad from overwork, and from this crowded crazy town, I am a survivor as you know and don’t go mad just casually. Really it was almost fun, with the “team” pulling together and all that rot. I guess all jobs are that way—whatever you do comes to seem important, it has to be done and done right in your one small corner of the universe, like a waiter taking care of his six tables. It is trivial, but only because everything is trivial when you boil it down.

  I confess that NY is a bit contagious too. Once you stop fighting it, you do begin to feel a part of it all. I don’t have that stranger-in-town complex any more. In fact, someone stopped me on the street to ask directions yesterday! What did I tell them? To hop in a taxi and give the address in a clear audible voice.

  After the issue was safely tucked in last night, we had a minor celebration at the office. Mary got loopy on half a glass of champagne. Others drank a lot more and there was dancing, which only made me miss you. I didn’t want to dance, and felt very alone—but
being a survivor, I survived. And ended up practically carrying Mary back to the apartment. Which, by the way, is my main news. Were you perceptive enough to notice the new address on the envelope?

  A gorgeous, placid Sunday. Even NY is quiet. Pretty and peaceful in Central Park, where the trees are turning. Some of the office crowd do a touch football game in the Park on Sundays, but I think I’ll pass. (Get it?)

  I trust you have been behaving yourself? Miss you.

  Love,

  Katy

  Something wrong there, Doug mused absently, as he read the girlish postscript: “I have windows!” He had read this letter a month ago, read it last night, read it at noon today, and each time had found it painfully deflating—some intangible nameless horror hung from its margins—yet right now he could find it almost comforting. Something was missing, yes, but Katy did still love him. Plus the letter was part of a larger phenomenon, namely the collected letters, that continued to lend him a sense of control. He felt like a scholar scratching for the truth in the windless harbor of his book-plastered study.

  But here was Donna—had he asked her name or had she volunteered it?—keeping him to her schedule. “You’re rushing me. Do you work on commission in this place?”

  “It isn’t that sort of bar, sir,” she laughed. Donna appeared to be having a high time of it and maybe she was; maybe she was part of the syndrome Kate had tried to define—people doing jobs, building their lives around those jobs, where on paper they were “just” the plumber, the bus driver, the waitress …

  “That’s an ugly word, isn’t it?” he said. She stared at him amused and waiting. “Syndrome, I mean.”

  “I knew you were a writer. You are, aren’t you?”

  After she had gone again, he sipped slowly. The ale had lost its taste and bite, it was only cold, and he only kept drinking out of a mindless commitment to the occasion, to the place, to Donna herself.

  The letters had lost some bite too, partly from being read too many times, so he let go of the determination to be absolutely thorough. Impatient with ransacking out clues and painful nuances, he skipped two dreary ones that were entirely concerned with the goddamned magazine, though at once he became less a scholar than a lawyer posthumously resolving the intricacies of his own last will and testament.

  Douglas,

  A first. I am writing you from the office. And typing the letter—hope you can stand being able to read it for a change. I guess I’m cheating the company, but hey, they owe me, and anyhow it’s my only chance to do it, so clackety clickety click to you, sir.

  Mid-autumn is gorgeous, even in NY. There is Central Park, of course, but there are also the rivers and smaller parks like Carl Schurz over by Gracie Mansion etc. And there is sometimes a real festival atmosphere, windy and bright, runners & rollerskaters, skateboarders and sailboaters, pretzelmen & pretzelwomen with their little carts and their cans of Sterno. A funny world, one day so sombre and the next day gay as a rainbow. Too much for a simple upstater like me.

  Saturday we rented bicycles and rode till we were exhausted. Then a bunch of folks came by our place and we popped corn, so watching Mary’s two-station TV was as good as a real movie, except for the ads. I was just so glad of a good Saturday. I thought of that song you like, about looking for the heart of Saturday night, and thought about you too, of course.

  That’s all the news fit to print in one coffee break. I thought your letter was too lovely, the long one I mean, and I plan to re-read it every time I get feeling the least bit insecure about my character, my intellect, or my physical charms. Thanks.

  About phoning. Best bet is dinnertime Mon or Tues, or early Monday morning.

  xox,

  K.T.

  Surprisingly, it was seven o’clock and the room had been filling up, someone at every other table, and Doug had to consider a move to the bar. He wobbled slightly getting untracked in the direction of the restroom and then, standing at the urinal, began to laugh, which caused him to sprinkle his shoes. “Perfectly sober, officer,” he said to his reflection in the mirror, then pushed back through the swinging door and dodged a waitress carrying drinks.

  The booth bobbed up in his viewfinder like a small wooden ship, so alluring and safe that he was adamant he would never move to the bar. He was here first. Almost playfully he shuffled the few remaining pages, glanced at one, and was frankly amazed that there could have been such pain from it earlier. Katy had seemed so callous to him, so selfish and unfeeling. He had cursed her for her triviality, for making their love so trivial, and for her disloyalty. Now that he had come to the photograph, he could see that was all wrong. There was no evil in her, she was just pretty Kate, and he called up another picture of her, sitting naked in bed, imagined quite easily all the polished gradations of her perfect skin, her long hair the color of ambershot ale—

  “Did you want something to eat?”

  This was Donna. He reorganized himself to focus on her. “Sure,” he said. “Great idea.”

  “But what? I will need more information, sir.”

  “A pizza?” said Doug, aware that she had said something funny in a good-natured way, yet unable to respond properly. “Plain cheese pizza?”

  “Sure. It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll wait here,” he said, trying to get himself back into the flow of their routine. He watched her walk toward the kitchen and wondered why her legs, in green tights, reminded him of potatoes. He wished the legs were perfect, with long smooth perfect muscles, like Katy’s. He wished that Donna were just slightly beautiful and he thought, poor Donna, poor legs, and felt terribly sorry for her until somehow he recalled that Donna seemed perfectly cheerful.

  Meanwhile he had skipped ahead to yesterday’s letter, the most recent, like an impatient reader peeking at the ending.

  Dear Doug,

  Your farflung correspondent, on assignment in The Big Apple, where at last the World Series talk is fading away. It’s bad enough that no one in New York believes any other place in the world truly exists, they also can’t seem to believe any activity proceeds, other than baseball.

  Mini-breakthrough to report. My immediate boss, this guy Bill Kingman, liked some of my stuff well enough to carry it “upstairs” to Simonson. Just a start, but wouldn’t it be amazing if if if if (say the brown bells of Cardiff)? And yes I know I am just being a goose, but the one he liked best was that fiction piece you liked, about the guy with the dogs. They don’t use fiction, but what the hey, let ’em know what you can do, right?

  But there’s something else I need to talk about here—I guess I’m nervous to start. You know I have had a friendly “date” or two, coffee or a beer or what have you, and maybe you have done the same, why not? Bill asked me to go skiing with him in Vermont and that sort of thing I have not done. But I did sort of discover that I like feeling slightly unattached. Or maybe what I like is the illusion of feeling unattached when the protection of our attachment is there to fall back on. Very possibly so.

  There are so many moments when I just miss you and can’t believe we are where we are, and there are other times when I realize it’s being “where we are”—you there, me here—that gives me my little bit of trite, trivial, silly “freedom.”

  Being honest, I should also say that I have gotten close to one particular guy here, a friend of Mary’s who does camera work for several different publications. But he is not trying to monopolize me at all. On the contrary, he is downright doctrinaire about people staying open, and free, so you can believe it is nothing serious, Doug. Roger is just one of the thousands of interesting people in this city—one I happened to meet.

  No final Thanksgiving plan yet, but I will be home Thur and Fri at the very least, so we will have a chance to talk all this over if you want.

  Love,

  Kate

  Doug doubled the rubber band around his sheaf of letters and let it snap. He fed cold pizza slices to his face, staring at the funhouse reflection of himself in the mug. These pass
ages had seared him earlier, almost disgusted him with their casual revelations, their insincerities and evasions, murkiest of transitions. But it was all one big murky transition, wasn’t it, over the absurdly short course of seven weeks, from a time when she allegedly dreamt of him every night, to the present, when she and Roger Photographer were nothing serious.

  Hell of a transition, to be sure, but somehow the words and even what lay behind them did not upset him now. At the moment, he was full of good fellowship—happy for Bill Skiwax, happy for Roger Photographer, concerned about Donna … Or was Donna just one of the thousands of interesting people in Braxton, no more and no less? Doug doubted that Roger P. had lumpy potato legs, though, Rog would have lean legs, designer jean legs, and look like Christopher Reeve or a tall Tom Cruise, with lots of teeth.

  It was past eight on the Genessee 12-Horse Clock above the row of flashing bottles, and with ale up to his eyelids, Doug was definitely ready for a change of air, a look at the Braxton County harvest moon. He gained his feet on the second launch and stood wrestling with the question of a tip—would a very large tip be insulting in some obscure way?—when Donna appeared.

  “Goodnight,” she said.

  “It’s been a pleasure—thanks to you. Thank you.”

  “Drive carefully on your way home.”

  “I’m walking,” he said, though this was not the case. “But I will walk carefully.”

  “You never did end up asking me out.”

  “I didn’t? It’s hard to remember what I asked. Anyway, I lied,” he lied. “I am a writer. So you see—”

  “I thought you were. I was trying to decide if I’d make an exception for you. In my rule.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you, even to think of it. But I’ve got kids, I’m afraid—you know, a wife and kids. Got to get home now. So thanks again, really.”